Bede and Cicero

Extract

A great weight of authority supports the view that Bede was averse to pagan rhetoric and had never read anything of its formative literature. I have briefly questioned this opinion elsewhere, and should like now to investigate it more fully. The evidence, of Bede's biblical commentaries in particular, suggests first, that his attitude toward Roman rhetoric was ambivalent, as was that of Augustine and Cicero; secondly, that his knowledge of it reached into the theory of invention; and finally, that he had access to Cicero's De inventione.

11Wright, N., ‘Bede and Vergil’, Romanobarnarica6 (1981), 361–79, has now restored the works of Vergil to Bede's library, their place having been previously brought into doubt by Hunter Blair, ‘From Bede to Alcuin’, pp. 244–50.

23 See the texts cited above, nn. 4 and 13. In the second reference, ‘saecularis eloquentia’ seems to thrive on dialectic and disputation. In neither is there any thought of style; eloquence is argumentation.

28 In Bedae opera de temporibus, ed. Jones, C. W. (Cambridge Mass., 1943), pp. 307–15 for the background, see Jones's comments ibid. pp. 132–5. I cite the text from this edition, even though it is now repr. CCSL 123C (Turnhout, 1980), pp. 617–26.

29 See above, n. 9. Roman vituperatio was practised in a number of writings certainly known to Bede, mainly polemical works of Jerome and Augustine, but also the De excidio Britanniae of Gildas. On Gildas's use of classical rhetoric, see Lapidge, M., ‘Gildas's Education and the Latin Culture of Sub-Roman Britain’, in Gildas: New Approaches, ed. Lapidge, M. and Dumville, D. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1984), pp. 27–50.

48 See the evidence in Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, pp. 157–9, and the apparatus fontium in De doctrina christiana, ed. Martin, , p. 269, which reveals even less knowledge of the De inventione than Hagendahl claimed to see.

51HE IV. 2 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 332). After praising these men, Bede mentions certain subjects which they taught: metre, astronomy, and ecclesiastical arithmetic. The list must be taken as selective, unless one is prepared to believe that at Canterbury the study of literature had shrunk away to verse, Bede, elsewhere (ibid. p. 514, speaks admiringly of Aldhelm's great learming and of his ‘sermo nitidus’, ‘cultivated style’.

52 For Biscop's connections with Canterbury and his trips to the Continent, six in all, see Bede's, Historia abbatum, in Venerabilis Baedae opera historica, ed. Plummer, C., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), I, 363 and 373.

53 It is a principal source of his Disputatiode rhetorica, which was written at Charlemagne's court. In his poem on the treasures of York, also composed after he went to the Continent, Alcuin claims that the cathedral library held Cicero's rhetorical works. Godman (Alcuin, p. 125) doubts the claim, apparently because outside of Alcuin's poem there is no trace of these works in eighth-century England. If this be the test, then the evidence of Bede's writings suggests that Alcuin is likely, to have been telling the truth.

54 For their helpful comments on this study I am grateful to George Brown, Ann Freeman, Martin Irvine, and Paul Meyvaert.